Weatherhead

by J. M. Hushour

  She pushed him away, refusing his curse. What steals away the long shadows better than the sun at midnight? Tell me who I am or it will always be Thursday here. Tell me how to save you.

  So he did.

  ⧜

  Maggie Mechaine had never really gotten that hoodie to dry out properly or gotten the ghosts out of it after that week at the lake so instead she’d gone to meet him at the movie theater in a billowy, willowy dress that she’d wear for the next two days. She stood there, almost beautiful, waiting. He never came. Afterwards he imagined her fluttering into the hospital where three bullets were being plucked out of him, those folds of crimson and violet, more flutter than woman, something one never dreams of in life—and when he woke up and saw her there in her lovely ankle-swarming sundress, his first thought was that she must’ve really, really wanted him to see her in it. He was clutching a fold of it in his hand. It felt like a victory, the victory of the sniper beneath the earth, whose bullets carve and swive up through the rock and dirt, hunkered down in graves, stalking those perched on their edges, not to kill them, but to send them reeling back the other way, off the edge—the edge of a dress. He opened his eyes.

  But this was very unlike her. She’d never worn dresses, had she? She’d always worn dresses, hadn’t she? Lean with the ache of chill, she’d never been given over to setting free the air about her legs for wind is the essence in such places, it carries us along, scatters the parts of us like seed across fell, fallow ground. Maggie Mechaine was scattered over snow, though, as if to preserve her and for all the galleries she’d littered her life with there was only one now that wasn’t empty—this one, she thin-faced and white above him, like an angel descending, brimming over with a permanent art of death. Go on, take her hands—

  For a moment he thought he was dreaming. No. He was not dreaming now. He knew better than to dream. In Weatherhead, such things were forbidden.

  She simply stood for a few forevers staring down at him, grimly shone her little figure. Her voice collapsed immediately into a curt, violent sob. “Still alive!” she called out to somewhere, “still alive!” Two days she’d stood there, refusing to eat, refusing to sleep, kept her smoking in her cups tucked into the corner by an open window—she’d so acquired a feral glare, eyes hollowed out by sleeplessness and placid horror, that in a crowd, even if you didn’t know Maggie Mechaine you’d still know who was carrying the knife. Indeed, she looked as if she could kill the crowd, leaving no one wondering, where is the killer in our midst. When he yawned and opened his eyes and saw her standing over him, he started.

  Mal had been fortunate, she told him. A villain’s bullet had shattered his humerus just above his elbow. He’d been there when Maggie arrived at the hospital. Mal later told him,

  “I knew they were coming—that she was coming in. I’d been waitin’ by the door, there were cops, press everywhere, and then I see this woman standing all quiet in the middle of everything, just staring straight ahead—she’s—like a hit to head, man—just then—she looked so beautiful. You know why? Because she was so fierce. And then she reared up, like a snake or something and she roars—not screams—she roars, ‘They shot him!’ and the whole room stopped and saw her there and they knew, everybody knows she’s your wife and all and she just stands there with her fists balled up, ‘They shot him!’ over and over. I went over and grabbed her—it was like she didn’t even know who I was—it was like wakin’ your dog from a bad dream and for a moment it doesn’t know you and snaps at you—“

  Two days and she hadn’t left his side, hadn’t sat down.

  “Mags,” he croaked. Whiter she went. She had forgotten her name in her form of seraphic doom. Grief made her prettier, he thought. He tried to reach up to her. She took a step back and he panicked, the feeble-minded fool. He remembered thinking, was he dead? Was he an emergent specter looming out of the ether at him? But, no, he couldn’t be dead, not yet, he thought, because he really had to pee.

  Her wild eyes stared down at him. “Still alive,” she breathed out, part whisper, part prayer. There were a stack of books next to the bed, he could see. Crosswords and novels. The nurse later told him, when he finally convinced Maggie to go home with Mal, that she’d stand there for hours over him reading aloud.

  “My sis—sister used to read to me. When I was l-little.”

  Maggie smiled. “She would. She told me. I thought you’d like it.” She said his name again.

  “Why do you keep sayin’ m-my n-name—“

  She still wouldn’t touch him. Severely, she surveyed him. “The name is the last thing to go, that’s what I heard, the name” she whispered, “once that’s gone—“

  He could remember now, as he sat up with a wince, an aching parade of words skirting his sleep—half-awake, starved of light, the small words caressing her ear there in the dark were hers. Poets imprisoned in adjacent cells reciting their works to each other out of sheer boredom. She sniffled. Her nose was as red as her hair. The collar of her shirt had been turned out, hiding her neck. She looked nunly. She waved a book at him. “This was the movie we were supposed to see. This is the—“ she squinted at the spine and cleared her throat, “novel—novelization of the movie.” She turned it over in her hands. “I’m not very good at making the sounds, like the bombs and planes—“

  He smiled weakly. “So did they save him? The soldier?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you were listening or not. Don’t you want to see the movie?”

  “I think I’d rather you read it to me again.” Something touched the top of his head. He reached up. “What is this?”

  She looked down at the sheets. She still hadn’t touched him. She was afraid of him. “I always keep frames in my purse—“

  “—for emergencies,” he shook with laughter, winced again.

  “—yeah—“ she smiled down at him, “so I snapped it into pieces and made that for you. I thought you’d like it—it might protect you, or something.”

  “Protect me from what?” He turned it over in his hands. She’d broken a frame and, with surgical tape, lashed it together into a crude cross.

  “I dunno,” she clasped her hands behind her back, “seems like they’re always protectin’ people from something or other.”

  He touched the story weakly, “Could you read it to me again? Sit—“

  She said of course, and put the tools to accomplish this against his cracked, dried lips. She tasted like smoke and mustard. She straightened up and fetched something out of her pocket. It was her barometer. She turned it over and fidgeted with her lips, scrutinizing its face. “Were you,” he coughed, chest wracked with pain, “making sure it wouldn’t rain on me or something?” A nurse appeared at the door, smiled, and withdrew.

  Maggie’s face darkened. “No—I—“ she bit her lip and her one-eye squint became a two-eye symmetry of balistraria. “Mal brought it for me. I wanted—“ She curled her hands around it and touched it to her forehead. Death, for her, he now saw, was something more solemn than he would’ve assumed, fear of it was now something worthy of translation, of marginal illumination in the little bible of Maggie Mechaine. “I wanted to see—they weren’t sure at first where you’d been shot—that you might—not make it. They weren’t sure, but just in case—I wanted to know, when—if you did—if I was here beside you—if the barometer would fall or rise.”

  It had remained steady.

  Who would drive? Give me a child? I was ready to come after you and bring you back,” she whispered. She already talked Weatherhead even then, he reflected. She would never withdraw, never retreat. She could leap into those illuminations with the best of them. He could see that in her eyes. He would again. “I had to know if I needed to go up or down.”

  “Why would we forget it? Cover it?” The hair was growing back on his chest. He had been lucky. A bullet in the shoulder and one in the chest that just missed his heart, missed everything conceivably crucial, the bullets were flying blind, she thought, had no eyes to crash into him w
ith the way she did, nobody steering them. He’d been home a week. He’d be a detective now, they told him. Mal, too. For going above-and-beyond.

  “Is this why women dig scars on guys?” She didn’t say anything. She wanted something lasting for herself, her quiet told him. They couldn’t have been any more naked than they were just then, his body brown, her body white. He pressed the tip of a giant finger to the ridge of her spine.

  She was rapt with his wounds in that wild way that animals have when they get injured. But she, who he wished didn’t love him at all anymore, this week being an exception, who used her own spit as a mortar to seal all the cracks in his body, approached the intrusions of metals into his chest as something that was almost her responsibility, like she’d been the one, the one to shoot him.

  It was the spell, she told him, that held her little feet down, anchored her to the earth, the spell that repeated to her over and over again that he was in fact, alive. “I always tell myself,” she murmured into his neck, “that storms are jealous of us because we just keep going on and on and on.”

  “If they’re pissed, then maybe I didn’t get shot enough.”

  “They’re not mad,” and that she knew this seemed, in that moment, when he lingered in injury, pain something tomorrow, to be the most natural thing ever, because didn’t Maggie control the weather anyway? Wasn’t that why, she maintained, that a World Series had never been rained out? “You got shot enough. And they missed your face, thank God.” And she never thanked any god for anything!

  Entwined and naked-as-knives in a drawer together, they watched a western. “I kinda like this one,” she told him at some point. He thought she’d fallen asleep because she wasn’t laughing at Ugly’s antics. An epic, Dostoevskyian novel with guns instead of spiritual crisis, he told her. She could care less.

  The man with no name, she dreamed.

  They found him. No—it was her. She found him dancing in gauze.

  (46 Across) I am the Bone Thief’s Perfect Hiding Place.

  He’d slipped back into Weatherhead the previous night. He’d tricked her with his scarecrow made out of her used bandages and escaped her camp in the grove. In a rare alley free of rape, he’d slept in a nest made of printless newspapers wadded up as a mattress. Nearby screams were the only blankets at hand. He dreamed of exits which meant entrances. He did this because alchemy was the most important among the many sciences of Weatherhead: clouds-into-flowers and leaves-into-questions and exits into entrances. The thing with exits and entrances was: how had he gotten to Weatherhead? Of course, he knew that the scum of Love had come and taken him away after he’d bit the bullet—that he’d chased after Maggie Mechaine—all this he remembered now. She had, in her own way, though, summoned him. He knew this because there’d been a map to show him the way. A book of maps? Or were they faces? Why did he see faces? Was this how he’d found his way?

  “How did the lady get the curse?”

  Silver struck sparks off her teeth with her frown. She brooded over the poem. “It doesn’t say. Huh. She just had it. No one knew why. She was cursed to sit and make pictures of stuff without ever actually seeing anything she drew.”

  All she could see were the long shadows. Nothing more. But what about afterwards?

  “After that? She was dead, dummy.”

  That didn’t mean she stopped loving the knight. And what about what she left behind? All the stuff she wove?

  Silver mimed shooting him where he lay in bed. “Too many questions, kid, too many questions.”

  And this troubled the child he’d been: what about all the things left behind in the fairy poems and tales? The Lady’s weavings? All that spun gold thread?

  Was he not supposed to wonder? But how many are the heresies that Love puts before us? There are always curses and hexes. Love can make god seem dead or, at the least, make god or goddess the one we love. How long had he lain in the church of the river of dreams? It’d been raining on him for a good while. The newspapers were damp, his hair clotted with mud and ash.

  He called up her face. It swam up grey before him, that face she made, half of a supposed smile, looking up from under her sleepy-blink eyelids. He studied the long nose, the line of her jaw, marveled at what bones must’ve lain beneath there. We need the bones to transmute thought-into-motion, the skeleton, the frame. Her frame had been robbed. And what had been left behind? All the hateful things of Maggie Mechaine? Or was it the roar, the roar that’d bent him to her that very first day ever when she sat there, huddled over a crossword, ignoring him, the faint strains of—oh, who was it—Kyuss or K.I.S.S. or something like that cabin-fevering somewhere behind her in her workshop.

  With an ache and a groan, he climbed to his feet. The city was dying around him. He was desperate for a cigarette. Or a drink. As an afterthought, he stuffed his pockets full of the empty newspapers. Digging around amongst the debris, he found a length of string, too. His shoulder ached where he’d once been shot. Funny, he thought, how the villains of the long shadows are just inventions of drunken smiles here on the plain. His lips ached from the hex he’d given her. Spells always torment the ones casting them, sometimes more than the receiver.

  He stepped out of his bed-stay alley and yawned and stretched and wondered after Maggie’s bones. He’d fetched some lengths out of her red rejoicing remains, yes he had. All that red, red snow, all that snow had to go—and what was with the sky today, the sky over Weatherhead? What had so happened to the sky over Weatherhead that its pitch and yaw had changed and it didn’t look so more like the game was gonna be rained out forever, it looked like a field of bones turned upside down for here and there were lengths of not-cloud through whose fractures shown an unmartyred kind of light.

  It was almost done, then. With a shiver about his shoulders he set out across the feverish city. On the brink, Weatherhead smelled of that meat-sewage smell of death. A reminder of her death, no doubt. The air was warmer, too, the bite of the icy of the wind had abated, now the air above the plain thrummed live-wire, unhungered by the liberation of the pitches of the people of the city. But their song was discordant, mad, and dissonant. This was fine, though. He knew her song now. He would teach it to them.

  How to describe the madness of Weatherhead after the return of the season, the reunion of its devastated, anxious citizenry with their pitches! There was the constant crumble and woe-clatter of hideous music everywhere one turned one’s ears, the music a black udder that the mouths and fingers sucked at, wringing it dry of indelicate thunder-punched melodies that only long-forgotten pitches could dredge up: mostly melodies of hatred. Scarlet symphonies were few and far between. These were the desperate anthems of an oppressed people seeking revenge. The only love on hand was the occasional stray, gruff molestation that came into being in the sooty remains of hearths in bombed-out houses or in the mentioned alleys, places of a noble grace, half-charred, too, but drummed on by the perfect red rain now falling—men fell upon women, women fell upon man—half-carcass and cartwheel, fingers plucked at buttons and zippers with aplomb—he turned away from these scenes.

  To journey across Weatherhead was to be trapped in a nightbird’s song. There were ripped and bloody dresses in the penultimate looms and blooms of the ash trees. A rain was washing away the cracks in skulls and shins and arms. Once, near the place where she’d kept the pitches, a center of particular violence, a frothy mob cornered him in an alley and demanded of him that he dream to excess and invoke the high voice for deliverance and finish her off once and for all. He fought them off with his fists and his empty pistol, bringing both down on skulls and ears. He’d kill for a bullet, he thought.

  Fires and orgies were becoming indistinguishable for both raged and raped their way across the face of the city. Even the sky was terrible. Her kitekillers ranged the heights, especially a good score or so who had populated the UnTower, covering all points of the sick compass of Weatherhead, and were sniping now and again at enterprising townsfolk who’d lashed themselves to their k
ites, floating crucifixions trying to escape through the Up, as if heaven were some solace. Somewhere near the center the devastation was worse. Autumn had been born near here, just yesterday, at the feet of the ruler of Weatherhead. The space she’d cleared for the leaves to begin their leap up and their fall down had disappeared. The nearby buildings had been torn to pieces. The only signifier of the fete’s former location was the crowd of people milling about a swatch of her blood that their knife fight had left on the concrete. The sicknesses of Weatherhead were taking turns clawing at it, urinating on it, and trying to set the dried blood on fire. With kicks and buffaloes, he sent the madmen and madwomen scattering off into the rubble, away with their tommyrot! And he got down on his knees and kissed and sniffed this blood. He knew the city watched and he knew Hate was everywhere so he climbed back to his feet, wrinkling his nose and sniffed, beast, the air. Hunt not chase, he declared and applause rang out. He moved on.

  Maggie had once taught him a word, palimpsest. Something written over something else. Was this what Weatherhead and she were doomed to be? Rent, torn, and tear and then remade. Was there nothing constant even in death? But she’d told him: there was no such thing as death, no such things as ghosts. She was Weatherhead and Weatherhead was she. Both now both revolution and revelation and he was the messiah missing her, messing her, mussing her, an illiterate savior nailed to the post checking into the hotel of lost causes.

  Weatherhead took him for martyr-madman. Dusty grey folk dragged themselves through autumn towards him, the leaves clutching greedily, sucking at their shoes and boots. They couldn’t tear her out of the fronts of buildings, they cried, her eyes were everywhere. Every building was a spy. Every idea associated with her was suspect and the whole city was this. It was rumored she once sat on a low, wooden bench and ginger-pricked blood out from under her fingernails after a particularly nasty brawl. Thus, all wooden benches were consigned to the flames. These benches of Weatherhead were dunny blue and had all once sat just to the right of the back door of their home before they moved to Alaska.